If you haven’t heard of the mythic tale of Nagamandala…the tale of a snake who falls in love with a woman and seduces her in the form of a her husband…then you probably weren’t as surprised as I was to read of an actual woman, Bimbala Das, who fell in love with a snake, and who ultimately married the nagaraj in a public ceremony, which everyone in the village believed would also remove a curse on her family…perhaps the veil between myth and our daily mundanes is far thinner than it would seem…
Mischa Berlinski visited Bimbala and has written a book on the subject which may be worth a read…
A woman who fell in love with a snake has married the reptile at a traditional Hindu wedding celebrated by 2,000 guests in India. Bimbala Das wore a silk saree for the ceremony at Atala village near the Orissa state capital Bhubaneswar. Priests chanted mantras to seal the union, but the snake failed to come out of a nearby ant hill where it lives. A brass replica snake stood in for the hesitant groom. “Though snakes cannot speak nor understand, we communicate in a peculiar way,” Das, 30.
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